It was called Inter Cætera—a name that rolled off Latin tongues but settled like a brand upon the flesh of the world. Penned by Pope Alexander VI in the spring of 1493, this bull did not merely chart a course across oceans; it split the earth. With a stroke of ecclesiastical authority, he cast an invisible line west of the Azores, gifting all lands beyond it to Spain, so long as they weren’t already ruled by Christians. The Church, cloaked in the language of salvation, offered conquest as divine mandate.
But what it really did—what it always did—was baptize theft. It declared that the bodies, the lands, the gods, and the futures of people unknown to Europe could be rendered null, so long as they did not kneel to the cross. It was not law in the modern sense. It was something older, something more dangerous. It was permission—permission wrapped in holy parchment, soaked in the blood of imagined grace, and handed to men who saw empires in every horizon.
Inter Cætera became the scaffolding for the Treaty of Tordesillas, the ancestor of the Doctrine of Discovery, the whispered justification behind colonizers’ boots on stolen shores. And with it began a long, cruel alchemy—where prayers turned into chains, and salvation meant erasure.
